by Rob Binkley
I dragged myself into the shower and let the cold water pour down. Nothing against homosexuality, I love the LGBT community, but I had been violated. I spent an hour scrubbing my body looking for my lost dignity to the sound of Brian laughing like a hyena. I never found my dignity in that shower. Felix left me regretting I ever trusted a stranger. I reemerged from the bathroom and guzzled a bottle of water, then fell onto my sheetless bed. Brian just smiled.
“Just … don’t.”
Brian laughed. “What? My name is Paul and this is between ya’ll.”
“Dude, I regained consciousness during mid—whatever. If anything happened, he was having sex with a corpse.”
“Whatever man; I believe you. I mean … he was hotter than Inga.”
It had taken six weeks for both of us to get violated overseas. I turned off the lights and put my pillow over my head. “Is the world just as corrupt as America?”
Brian busted out laughing, “Obviously, yes!”
“Has everyone’s soul been sucked to hell?”
Brian rolled over in his bed, “Try not to think too hard.”
The next morning, I packed my stuff. Sorting through the remnants of last night, I muttered, “This trip is getting ridiculous.”
Brian looked at me. “You said you wanted new experiences.” I could tell he was trying to keep a straight face.
I was never going to live this down. The Felix thing was screwing with my head. I had been searching the world over for real-life Beats, even though Brian kept saying it was a fool’s game. The reality was, I wasn’t finding any “saints of the streets” on the road. I’d been swan diving into the depths of the food chain, looking to find the purest of filthy souls and had found nothing but deeper holes of humanity.
I’d befriended freaks, fiends, and drunks, and after much research, it appeared they weren’t holy beatnik saints untainted by capitalism after all….
They really were insane freaks, fiends, and drunks.
The Felix incident taught me I couldn’t get by on just having blind faith in humanity anymore, not in a world out to hustle people like me. I also couldn’t drink Bundaberg Rum anymore. Christ, I couldn’t black out anymore! It scared me to think of myself during a blackout just letting go of the wheel and hoping my car wouldn’t drift into oncoming traffic. But I had done it hundreds of times. My luck has to be running out.
I made a resolution not to black out again. I didn’t want to end up in bed with another man … unless I was sharing a bed with Brian to save money.
The time had come to finally leave Sydney after two weeks of fun, fondling, and felonies. We left knowing we had experienced the best and worst of a great beach town full of awesome and horrendous people.
We left Bondi Beach on the Oz Experience Bus on our way to Dog Sheep Ranch where Brian and I would spend Valentine’s Day with thousands of sheep. Our plan was to travel up the eastern coast from Sydney all the way to the Great Barrier Reef and Cairns, where we would fly out. We estimated it would take about a month to complete.
We walked to our pickup spot on a corner and, sure enough, a brightly colored Oz Bus pulled up that looked like it once belonged to Ken Kesey.
“This is like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test bus,” I said.
“Happy now?” Brian said.
“Yes … yes, I am.” We shuffled onboard with a bunch of other like-minded lunatics.
Our magic bus ran into a snag just outside Dog Sheep Ranch. We couldn’t enter the property because heavy rains had flooded the river and road.
“This is unacceptable. We can cross this thing ourselves.” Brian jumped up. “C’mon!”
Back in America we’d probably be arrested for endangering ourselves or forced to sign a waiver, but “down undah” the driver just laughed and said, “Go on ahead!”
We balanced our packs on our heads and waded across the flooded river. Seeing two idiots like us survive inspired the rest of the backpackers to follow suit. We didn’t think any of the others would follow us after we spent the past four hours forcing everyone to watch Dumb and Dumber on repeat, which no one found funny. But they did.
When we all finally slogged our way up to Dog Sheep Ranch, we were greeted by a menagerie of wildlife. Bouncing kangaroos and screeching cockatiels were everywhere. The valleys and plains seemed endless and green. It was gorgeous. Just at that moment while looking out at this wonder, a cockatoo flew down and landed on a bunk next to me.
After we settled in, Brian and I took a tour of the sprawling one-thousand-acre ranch with the other backpackers. When we toured the main operations, I had to keep an eye on Brian; he seemed to be staring at the sheep a little too fondly. “We did say we wanted to try new and strange things on our world adventure, right?”
“Keep it to yourself, Rakow,” I said.
The head rancher announced, “Now we’re going to shear the sheep. Who wants to give it a go?” I didn’t want any part of it. Grabbing a poor screaming sheep and shaving it is a lot harder than it sounds.
Brian raised his hand. “Why do we have to ‘share’ the sheep when there are so many? It’s Valentine’s Day, and you guys have thousands.” All the backpackers laughed. The ranch hands looked like they wanted to shear Brian from head to toe.
That night after dinner, we sat around drinking with three gals from New Zealand who were very open about their sexuality. The girls talked about how horny they were and how they masturbate every night and wanted to get shagged constantly.
I asked them if their boyfriends ever cheated on them with sheep. They all said it has happened with some of their boyfriends but “a proper beau wouldn’t do that.” I asked if sheep sex was cheating or not, since “it wasn’t even a human.”
They all agreed it still was.
Later, Brian and I left the girls to venture into the paddock to roam around the rollicking hills. We didn’t have a torch, so we used the moon as our guide. We wanted to go cow tipping but we didn’t know how. We tried to sneak up on some cows but they realized what we were up to. This was either a regular occurrence, or we were too loud.
These cows would never let us near them, so we decided it was not nice to push over sleeping animals. So we tried to catch a sheep.
Call us depraved idiots, but we wanted to see if there were any sparks between these four-legged sex sirens and us. The girls said if you put their hind feet in buckets of water they wouldn’t run. But since we didn’t have any buckets, we tried to chase down one of the nimble little buggers. Every time we thought we had one cornered, it would jump a ravine or race down a cliff.
After an hour, we gave up our romantic endeavors and headed back to our dorm, where we could fantasize about the Kiwi girls (or the sheep) in private.
Good times?
The next morning, we were off for Bingara, an old mining town in the interior of Australia, in the state of New South Wales. Our driver said it was one of the only places where diamonds had been found.
“This could be the answer to all our money woes,” Brian said.
“Not bloody likely.”
The first thing we noticed when we got into town was the people of Bingara seemed to be a very close-knit group. Very few foreigners ever stepped foot near here. It felt like the Mississippi of Australia; the entire place had a very Deliverance feel to it.
We checked into the Imperial Hotel then found the only bar in town. It was small but had a pool table. The problem was the natives were already drunk and it was six o’clock on a Friday evening. You could tell the place was going to fill up with belligerent locals very soon. After a few beers, we learned you didn’t want to beat any of the locals at pool. They were all cowboys who were looking to fight some fancy-pants Yank, so we played it cool and lost a few games on purpose just to get in their good graces. Then I started kicking their asses and things got testy.
Trouble finds Brian, so it didn’t take long for him to get into a skirmish in the bathroom. After a few toilet-related run-ins, Brian asked me to watch his back while he was pis
sing, so I did. And just like he described, the cowboys came barging in to bump us and make snide remarks.
I tried to defuse the situation. “Hey fellas, we’re just like you—you like beer. We like your beer. You like women. We like your women, too. Can’t we all just get along?”
They stood there seemingly stunned by my idiotic speech, then shoved me into a bathroom stall and left laughing like a pack of jackals. We should have gone back to our room, but we didn’t have any booze waiting for us.
“I’m not sacrificing my buzz on account of a few sheep lovers,” Brian said, so we kept drinking till they closed.
By the end of the night, the cowboys wanted to fight so bad they resorted to aggressively hitting on all the Oz Bus girls we were traveling with. The final straw was when one of them came up and flipped me the bird. After staring at his dirty cowboy middle finger for a few seconds, I knew it was time to turn in before we got strangled to death by the grubby meat hooks of one of the local cowboys.
We hopped the Oz Bus to Byron Bay the next morning and got the hell out of Bingara. When we arrived in Byron, it was a totally different vibe—hallelujah. It was an earthy beachside town that had a cool downtown district. Byron felt like the opposite of Bondi or Kuta Beach; no high-rise hotels or chain restaurants had invaded yet.
“This place is like hippie surfer cool, man,” Brian said as he busted out his empty weed pipe and took off his shoes to mingle with the rest of the alternative hippies roaming about. The locals we met told us if the billionaire developers had their way, Byron would turn into Bondi Beach or even Surfers Paradise, which we kept hearing about, but the town was dedicated to preserving its funky small-town soul.
“I think I want to braid my hair,” I said while I watched all the cool surfer girls walk by.
“That’s probably not a good look for you,” Brian said.
“Is anything a good look for me?”
“How about a paper bag on your head? I wanna find a drum circle and get all tribal on someone’s ass!”
“Please don’t become Bongo-Playing Guy. I hate that guy.”
“That’s exactly who I’m gonna become!”
“I wanted you to go all beatnik, so I should have expected this.”
I ordered a gyro from the local food stall and sat down to watch the groovy scene while Brian went looking for a bongo and some weed. A cool girl named Jade, a typical name for the area, chatted me up on the park bench. She gave me a really good feeling about Byron. I couldn’t resist asking, “Is Jade your real name?” For all I knew it could have been her stage name. No such luck.
After we walked around town, we went back to our hostel, called the Arts Factory Lodge, and hung out with the other backpackers. The Arts Factory was set in an overgrown plot of land on the outskirts of town. It had bunkrooms, tepees, camping spots in the jungle, and huge tents. It was like a hippie commune. Everyone at the Factory looked like they just came from a Grateful Dead concert. We were with our people.
That night we went to the Railroad Bar, a pub by the railroad station with outside seating. At four in the morning, I lost everyone and ended up walking back to the Arts Factory in the dark. I went frog hunting, a carryover from Indonesia, and caught a big one, which I brought back to the hostel and presented to these two Danish girls.
“Looooook, pretttyyy,” I said like the creepiest kid in your seventh grade biology class, which scared them. Wielding the amphibian, I chased the girls around and woke up the entire hostel. Then I let the frog loose and couldn’t find him until the morning.
When Brian found out what I did the next day, he said, “You realize you’re a complete jackass.”
“Dude. I’m not evolving … I’m devolving.”
“No shit. Have you tried drumming?”
We went to the beach that afternoon, and I got a terrible sunburn even though I was already tan. Every Aussie we met said their “island has a bloody sunroof” in the form of a huge hole in the ozone layer, which explains why Australians have the highest skin cancer rate in the world.
“The way my life is going, my liver is going to explode before I die from skin cancer,” I said, before I realized I was flamebroiled.
Brian was barely awake in his chair. “Don’t worry. You’ll probably get killed by an angry mob first.”
We hung out at the beach all day and listened to people talk about sharks. There seemed to be a lot of sightings up the coast and some people, like the English girls we met last night, wouldn’t step foot in the ocean. Brian piped into the conversation. “This whole shark attack problem sounds a lot like malaria to me. It probably never occurs but it’s the fear of the unknown that scares people.”
I looked at Brian. “Have you noticed this guy has no arm?”
The guy telling the shark story held up his arm stump. “You bloody well know it happens here, mate. A great white bit my arm clean off, right out there.” The one-armed Aussie pointed his stump at the ocean.
Brian rolled over, unimpressed. “Whatever.”
We bought some dope from an English mate named Waldo to ease my sunburn agony, then Brian talked me into taking a drumming class in the rainforest. Simba was our instructor. I must admit it was pretty invigorating sitting outside with people from all around the world beating out tunes. Drumming my mind out, I looked over at Brian and he never looked happier. We both smiled marijuana smiles at each other as we drummed the rest of the day away.
Life, you are awesome.
Maybe it was the joy of discovering a cool new town, but it felt like we were finally learning something at this point on our journey. Maybe we hadn’t rid ourselves of all our fatal flaws, but our eyes were opening to the real joy in the world around us. I had accepted the fact that real joy doesn’t come from buying stuff or partying your brains out, it came from these moments when you feel truly alive.
While I drummed it occurred to me that maybe we should spend more time doing things like drumming in jungles with hippies and less time in bars. Rather than ponder that question too deeply, I kept on drumming.
At eight o’clock the next morning, the Oz Bus showed up again. We had fallen into the laid-back lifestyle of Byron and completely lost every shred of discipline in our lives, so the early start was a rude awakening. As we piled onto the bus half-asleep, I said, “Well, we’ve completely lost all structure.”
Brian was full of coffee and raring to go. “And it feels great! Congratulations Rob, you’re finally off the grid!”
We were soon on our way up the coast to the dreaded Surfers Paradise. We lost street cred with many of the backpackers on the bus who frowned on the place because of its reputation as a tourist trap. “Byron is radness, Surfer’s Paradise is shite!” That’s what we heard from the cool set, but Brian and I didn’t care. We kept our promise throughout the trip to experience everything.
We arrived at Surfers Paradise and checked into the Surf’n’Sun Beachside Backpackers hotel. Surfers Paradise wasn’t nearly as cool as Byron Bay, but it wasn’t horrible; it was like a cross between Waikiki and Kuta Beach.
Mike, our buddy from Canada who was travelling with us now, heard about a party the next night for all the backpackers. Each bar in town held weekly costume shows where the new people from each hostel got on stage and performed some weird act. This would not normally interest me, but the winning hostel team got a free bar tab for the night so we were in.
Mike hatched a bizarre plan. He said, “Since we were surrounded by douche-bag tourists, why not act like one?” He proposed we go dressed in Depend adult diapers and piss our pants onstage. It sounded like something a moron would plan. Naturally, we loved it.
The night of the contest, our first stop was a strip club where Mike, Brian, and I enlisted a French stripper named Nashda to come play with us. Brian thought she would help us win the contest. Nashda was in when she heard we were a bunch of weirdos wearing Depends.
When it was time for the stage shows, which took place at each bar, we had stiff competition. Ev
ery time our crew got on stage and did our drag show, the astonished crowds didn’t know what to think of us wearing Depends. We never won jack.
After we’d fully humiliated ourselves, Nashda and I left Brian and Mike at the bar and went to drunk dial my mom in the middle of the night. Don’t ask me why I thought this was a good idea. If I remember correctly, mom and Nashda had a lovely twenty-minute conversation about dolphins that cost me eighteen dollars.
After five nights of crapping our pants in this tourist hellhole, we realized we had to get back on the road if we wanted to retain any brain cells.
We jumped on the next Oz Bus and headed to Noosa, a posh resort town with the most crystal blue waters I’d ever seen. Noosa is where the upper crust go to get their sun. You could tell we were in an expensive resort town by all the fancy cars, boutiques, and high-end restaurants.
Of course, we couldn’t afford any of the luxuries being offered so we stayed at Koala’s, a backpacker hotel, in a room for five. It was just four of us travelling together now: me, Mike, Brian, and Gillian, a gal we met from England. We spread out in our large room.
We met some Norwegian girls on the bus ride over, so we made plans to go out with them that night. After dinner, we ended up at one of the upscale bars that actually required shoes, which we hadn’t anticipated. They wouldn’t let us in in our flip-flops so we snuck around the corner and swapped out our flip-flops with our girlfriends’ shoes and tried to get in again. But the bouncers didn’t buy it, even though they let the girls in wearing our flip-flops.
The bouncers made it clear they didn’t like “men in heels.”
Brian wouldn’t take no for an answer—being the foolhardy idiot that he is, he pulled five hundred dollars out of his pocket, which equaled about half-a-month of his backpacking budget, and waved it at the bouncers. “Don’t you want our money?!” As you might imagine, this obnoxious act didn’t go over well. The bouncers glared at Brian, who was now dancing around them like a turkey with his wad of money fanned out over his head.
I heard a police siren in the distance. Drunk and paranoid, I looked at Gillian. “They’re calling the cops. Let’s go.” I grabbed her hand and we left Brian dancing like a turkey in front of the bar. It hurt like hell to run in Gillian’s tiny high heels. After we ran about a hundred yards, we heard Brian screaming for me so we ran back to the bar just in time to see Brian and Mike get pounded by four bouncers.